increased proportion of travellers searching for meaningful experiences through contact with some aspects of the host culture.
Finally, travellers’ personality characteristics and their initial attitudes towards people visited have also clearly exerted an influence on the contact outcome. Thus, initially favourable attitudes to the host country overall led to more intense contacts with locals. The same can be observed for those with a more sociable and extroverted personality. This introduces a dilemma regarding the practical value of such contacts, if it is those who are already favourably inclined to the host at the outset that get to know them personally and through which contact reinforces these attitudes further, especially bearing in mind that the contact has minimal, if any, influence on more deeply rooted social attitudes such as ethnocentrism, racism or intercultural orientation. However, there is evidence that travellers who have, at the outset, relatively low level of ethno- centrism and heightened international orientation, are self-confident and outgoing, and these personality characteristics correlate positively with their travel experience. However, it is extremely difficult to ascertain whether their initially open-minded and relaxed attitudes that have brought them further afield or whether the cumulative effect of travel has resulted in formation of these attitudes.
Thus, the evidence presented here gives only a tentative support for those claiming that contacts facilitated through travel increase intercultural understanding. The evidence compiled here is perhaps more important for the tourism industry overall and for destination management and promotion in particular as claims that the tourism industry impedes the contact with local residents can be rejected. The arguments of those who have criticized the tourism industry for erecting barriers between travellers and their hosts might be valid for the prevailing style of travel organization some 20 or 30 years ago, but many modern-day tourists seek personal enrichment and cultural insights while travelling (Poon, 1994, 1998). In response to the changing expectations of travellers, the tourism industry throughout the developed world is seeking to restructure itself so that is able to provide tailor-made travel arrangements while retaining economies of scale (Petrillo, 2002).
The question remains whether or not the tourism industry could justifiably be called the world peace industry. To draw inferences to the issue of the world peace and harmony it has to be demonstrated that contacts at the individual level, such as those facilitated through travel, have an effect on the foreign policies mostly determined by the governments (Kelman, 1965). The recent occurrence of the ethnic violence and the small-scale armed conflicts perhaps best illustrate that, when there is a conflict over major political issues, these individual contacts are probably of little value.
It is another question altogether whether tourism fosters intercultural understanding. In general, the evidence to date indicates that this is also not the case, as post-trip attitudes have shown an inconsistent pattern of change.
However, if the question is whether tourism contacts are beneficial to this process, then the answer is clearly more positive. The fact that favourable post-trip attitudes were a consistent outcome of contact with the host population regardless of the destination choice or travel arrangements, suggests travel
clearly has a role to play in this regard. These changes, however, are very subtle and a large proportion of travellers are not able to ascertain the nature and degree of these changes. Furthermore, travellers do not report an increase in knowledge about the country visited following the trip or a change in their perceptions of the host nationals as a homogenous group. In some instances, the trip has not contributed to the lowering of perceptions of the cultural distance between travellers and the country visited. If the host nationals are continually perceived to be similar to each other, it means that they are continually perceived by travellers in a stereotypical fashion and the fact that they remain to be perceived as culturally different as at the beginning of the travellers’ journey questions the extent to which travel has resulted in a better understanding of travellers and their hosts.
There are some indications that travel may have some cumulative effect on the deeply rooted social attitudes of ethnocentrism and intercultural orientations.
Because of the methodological difficulties associated with this problem, it is difficult to determine whether travel was an outcome or a consequence of these attitudes. To ascertain this, it would be necessary to compare those that have not travelled overseas with those that are embarking on their first overseas travel, but this poses some significant challenges in terms of population definition and sample design. In any case, more studies, guided by the model proposed here, coupled with refinement of the contact measures and enriched through employing a qualitative research design, are needed. Post-trip focus groups or in-depth interviews would enable researchers to obtain better insights into the nature of experiences and their relevance to the impressions formed about people and country visited. Another avenue of further research could also be to compare how well tourist travel facilitates intimate contacts compared to other practices that could be initiated within a country’s multicultural policies to foster intercultural understanding and appreciation.
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© CAB International 2010. Tourism, Progress and Peace 35 (eds O. Moufakkir and I. Kelly)
3 Challenging Peace through
Tourism: Placing Tourism in the Context of Human Rights, Justice and Peace
F. H
iggins-D
esbiolles1and l. b
lancHarD21School of Management, University of South Australia, 2Centre for Peace &
Conflict Studies, University of Sydney, Australia
Introduction
Because tourism most frequently concerns the pleasure and leisure pursuits of the world’s privileged, it is seldom placed in the context of human rights, conflict resolution, justice and peace. However, it must not be forgotten that the right to tourism and travel are implicitly enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN, 1948) and is promised by a social tourism movement that has been active in countries throughout the world and promoted globally by the International Bureau of Social Tourism (BITS).
While the dominance of neo-liberalism since the 1980s has allowed the social welfare aspects of tourism to be overshadowed by its financial market potential, peace and justice advocates should not allow these developments to go unchallenged. This chapter reviews tourism’s capacity to contribute to human well-being, human rights recognition, conflict resolution, justice and peace. It will take a critical perspective, challenging the tourism industry’s public relations agendas of peace through tourism and pro-poor tourism (PPT) whose promise remains unfulfilled in a world of structural inequity and injustice. This analysis develops an understanding of how tourism can be harnessed to achieve important humanitarian goals, including peace, justice and respect for human rights.